Daniels says, "We wrote an episode where the women are trying to get together to decide decorations for the office party. Tiny little pieces of creativity. But the office is so hostile for them, being themselves. When it's something without rules, it makes them very timid and cautious. I think people who work in offices will recognize a lot of this."
"All these lame restrictions," Novak says. "And these are on cool people. Not just on dorks who like being in Sunday school. This is a huge cross-section of people. My brother works as a cell phone ring tone designer. You'd think, coolest . . . fringest job in the world? Man, you wouldn't believe the rules."
From left, B.J. Novak, Rainn Wilson, Steve Carell, John Krasinski and Jenna Fischer in a scene from the new show, which premieres Thursday.
(Paul Drinkwater -- Nbc)
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"Yeah," Daniels says. "Take casual Fridays. They say suits are stifling us. So let's get crazy. On Fridays, we're all going to wear the same pair of Dockers and an Oxford shirt without a tie."
NBC executives have promised to support the new "Office" during its rollout (they've been blitzing promos) and they know they have something different to sell to audiences. "I loved the original," says Kevin Reilly, president of NBC Entertainment. But, "Americans still have a problem with quote-unquote funny accents," and so the British show needed to be reworked for U.S. consumption. But Reilly says fans of the original will be pleased and won over, and for the majority of viewers who have never experienced the original, "they've never seen something like this on prime-time network television."
Daniels is hopeful, if wary. "I think we're all expecting it to be a small, pure audience at first," he says, laughing nervously, "and hopefully it will grow."
Indeed, that happened to the English show. "It had terrible, disastrously low numbers the first season," Daniels says. "It wasn't until they started replaying the first season over the summer that word-of-mouth started to build the show up. It probably might be similar for us."
Disastrously low numbers?
"You don't get the pineapple the first year. You got to make the pineapple plant flower a few times," Daniels says.
Novak and Kaling are staring at their boss. Pineapples?
"Or some other tropical fruit," he explains.
"We're transplanting it. And people who love pineapples who are used to the mature fruit, they might be looking at our little plant and thinking it's not as sweet as pineapple I've had before, but to them I would say: Let it ripen. Let it ripen."
